LONDON.- Canto Ostinato, a keyboard piece by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt made of overlapping layers and repeated patterns, has amassed a cult following in the Netherlands, at least.
In About Canto, a 2011 documentary directed by Ramón Gieling, people talk about the pieces impact on their lives: a former DJ who has some of the score tattooed on his shoulder, a woman who gave birth to her second child while Canto played and the brother of a man whose suicide note said that his life was fulfilled after hearing the piece in concert.
Canto Ostinato is the most famous piece by ten Holt, who died in 2012, and it is still extremely popular in the Netherlands. But established histories and concert programs of Minimalism beyond that country tend to congregate around a core group of important American figures such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and La Monte Young and ten Holts name is routinely missing.
There are clear similarities between ten Holts work and compositions by these more well-known figures. At the same time as celebrations mark ten Holts centenary including a Dutch lecture-performance tour exploring his biography and important influences and many performances of Canto in the Netherlands and abroad music historians have been asking if more (and more international) names need to be added to the canon of great Minimalist composers.
It really obscures the history and the pervasiveness of attraction to the music when we just think of Minimalism as a handful of figures, said Kerry OBrien, the co-editor of the forthcoming book On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement, which coincides with the release of Patrick Nicklesons Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music and Historiography in Dispute. Both books seek to dispute the written histories of Minimalism by widening its cast of characters.
After hearing Glass perform in the Netherlands, ten Holt began writing Canto in 1976. That same year in New York, Glasss Einstein on the Beach sold out two nights at the Metropolitan Opera, and Reichs Music for 18 Musicians premiered. Both are widely considered seminal Minimalist projects.
While the term Minimalism has often been contested by the musicians it has been used to describe, by the early 1970s the term had gathered momentum as a shortcut for describing music made with long tones or drones, apparent stasis masking gradual change and an emphasis on repetition. The genre subsequently dispersed, feeding into other genres such as pop, noise and ambient.
Canto shares a lot of traits with Minimalisms canonic multi-piano works such as Reichs Piano Phase or Six Pianos and invites structural comparisons with the overlapping parts and type of group improvisation in Rileys landmark composition In C.
Between a piece like Music for 18 Musicians and Canto Ostinato, I find there to be a through-thread of gratifying harmonic development, said Erik Hall, a Michigan-based musician who followed his solo, multi-tracked Reich album with a similarly constructed Canto recording. He added that he found further comparisons in the pacing, duration and endurance it takes to really sit with it and take it in.
Ten Holts route to a Minimalist style was far removed from developments in America. He was born in Bergen, in the north of the Netherlands, into a family of artists, and ideas from visual art informed his particular route in minimal music.
Before studying in Paris in 1949, ten Holt studied composition with Jakob van Domselaer, an associate of painter Piet Mondrian and one of the first to transfer the principles of minimal abstraction and strict geometry of the art movement de Stijl into music, in his piece Proeven van Stijlkunst (Experiments in Artistic Style). Its from the 1910s, and it sounds like Minimalism, its absolutely fascinating, said Maarten Beirens, a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.
Like many other European composers in his broad age group, by the late 1950s, ten Holt was incorporating serial procedures into his compositions, prioritizing dissonance over tonality and consonance. Later pieces like Canto saw ten Holt abandoning serialism, in a move he called tonality after the death of tonality.
There is no Minimalistic composer who has so much freedom as ten Holt, said pianist Jeroen van Veen, adding that ten Holts fluid compositions gave back what had been lost in the classical tradition: being flexible onstage. But in the wider historical schemes of Minimalism, and of European classical music too those characteristics do make him an outsider, van Veen said.
As does the lyrical Romantic pianism of Canto, which brings to mind Frédéric Chopin or Sergei Rachmaninoff and which connects to a longer history of European art music tradition.
But ten Holts exclusion from the canon was because of more than just this traditional turn. He wasnt a composer with the kind of connections that many composers had, Beirens said. Unlike his compatriot Louis Andriessen, Beirens added, he did not have steady relationships with certain performers, with orchestras or with the music business until a later point in his career.
That change came with van Veen, who started the Simeon ten Holt Foundation in 2015 to promote his music to an international audience. Still, today the vast majority of ten Holt recordings and performances remain in the Netherlands.
Language and location played a part in ten Holt being overlooked, too. The history of Minimalism depends on where you are in the world, OBrien said, adding: If you read a Dutch language history of Minimalism, a Minimalist classic like Canto Ostinato would be, I think, front and center. But such stories have yet to break into Anglophone-focused discussions of Minimalism.
When it comes to understanding Minimalism, we know how things ended up, OBrien said, and then we look back to history to reinforce the lead-up to that. And a composer like ten Holt who bridged musical worlds without ever truly settling in any camp quietly disrupts those narratives.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.